forth. And on the 28th of May, 1832, he told his father again that though he did not agree precisely in the principles of the latter, his principles had never been irreligious in theory or in fact. He apprises us elsewhere that no French or English journal ever reached Recanati, and it seems impossible to avoid supposing that he reckoned upon Count Monaldo's seclusion to secure him against discovery. It would be easy, but is also needless, to pursue the exhibition of this duplicity in detail. And what inference do we draw from these and like points established in evidence? Certainly not that we are to assume a liberty of denouncing him as a reprobate not that we are to obliterate or forget the traces of goodness any more than the proofs of greatness which his works exhibit: but that we are to protest in limine against the title he attempts to vindicate for himself of a dispassionate inquirer, who has arrived by the full and undisturbed force of his intellect at given results. If disease, difficulty, privation, nervous depression so acted upon his mind as to sap there the foundations of virtue in some of its first elements, it is too much that we should be called upon to believe that in his renunciation of principles both lying at the root of all revealed religion, and sustained, as he admits, by the universal voice of Nature, he is to be estimated simply as a Pure Intelligence not swayed to the right hand or to the left either by the agony that tore, or the disgust and moral nausea that oppressed, his mind. But having said thus much, and having desired to say it gently, let us leave him with thoughts only of the pity which his great sorrows solicit, and of the admiration that his genius challenges. Some, indeed, may be disposed to regret that his editors have been unable to keep back the matter to which we have last adverted. Their performance of their task, though inspired with a devoted love, is certainly open to the remark that they have omitted either too little or too much. The gaps in the letters are most numerous, and are commonly so placed as to suggest that the missing passages relate to the most critical points of opinion, character, and life. But without doubt it was better for a generation like our own, which, even amidst the increase of religious feeling, seems insensibly to relax its grasp upon objective truth, and to decline into feebler conceptions of its authority, that the case of Leopardi should be stated with at least that degree of fulness in which we now possess it. Lest in our desire to do justice to feeling and to taste, and lofty genius finding for itself a way to martyrdom through privation and intense and unremitting toil, we should have forgotten the verse with which he himself supplies us Deh quanto in verità vani siam nui! Lest we should have become unmindful of the temptations, the infirmities, infirmities, and the deep degeneracy of our race, and should have left a single reader predisposed even for one moment to the belief that any other waters than those which flowed from the bleeding side of the Redeemer can heal its plagues, any other wisdom than the 'foolishness' of the Gospel give it permanent, uniform, or consistent elevation. Rapidly surveying the character of Leopardi as a writer, we cannot hesitate to say that in almost every branch of mental exertion, this extraordinary man seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence. Whatever he does, he does in a manner that makes it his own; not with a forced or affected but a true originality, stamping upon his work, like other masters, a type that defies all counterfeit. He recalls others as we read him, but always the most remarkable and accomplished in their kind; always by conformity, not by imitation. In the Dorian march of his terza rima the image of Dante comes before us; in his blank verse we think of Milton (whom probably he never read); in his lighter letters, and in the extreme elegance of touch with which he describes mental gloom and oppression, we are reminded of the grace of Cowper; when he touches learned research or criticism, he is copious as Warburton, sagacious and acute as Bentley: the impassioned melancholy of his poems recalls his less, though scarcely less, deeply unhappy contemporary Shelley: to translation (we speak however of his prose versions) he brings the lofty conception of his work which enabled Coleridge to produce his Wallenstein; among his Thoughts' there are some worthy of a place beside the Pensées of Pascal or the Moral Essays of Bacon; and with the style of his philosophic Dialogues neither Hume nor Berkeley need resent a comparison. We write for Englishmen but we know that some of his countrymen regard him as a follower, and as a rival, too, of Tasso and of Galileo in the respective excellences of verse and prose. Some of his editors go further, and pronounce him to be a discoverer of fundamental truths: an error in our view alike gross, mischievous, and inexcusable. Yet there are many things in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments, in the moderation of his wants, in his noble freedom from the love of money, in his all-conquering assiduity. Nor let us, of inferior and more sluggish clay, omit to learn, as we seem to stand by his tomb beside the Bay of Naples in the lowly church of San Vitale, yet another lesson from his career; the lesson of compassion, chastening admiration, towards him: and for ourselves, of humility and self-mistrust. ART. ART. II.-Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Leopold Ranke. Translated from the German by Sir Alexander and Lady Duff Gordon. 3 vols. London. 1849. IT was sagaciously remarked by Count Podewils, once Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs, in a paper drawn up for the information of Frederick II., towards the close of the first Silesian war, that the political history of Prussia had been one constant struggle between its natural alliance with, and its natural opposition to, Austria.' That aphorism may be said to form the subject of these volumes, and it is because they illustrate it by extensive and authentic researches that we regard Professor Ranke's last production as a valuable contribution, not only to the history of his country at the most remarkable period of her military greatness, but even to the political literature of the present day. Far from having lost their interest by the passage of a hundred years, the events and negotiations which are here described with elaborate care from original documents, are still closely connected with the incidents and tendencies of the policy of the Prussian monarchy. The analogy of situation is in many places extremely strikingmore so, indeed, than M. Ranke could have surmised at the moment of composition. Sir Alexander and Lady Duff Gordon, we must add, have re-produced the work with great firmness and precision of language, and have supplied to their author the attractions of a flowing and frequently a graphic style, without the smallest sacrifice of English idiom or of German minuteness. The application to the purposes of history of materials such as those of which Professor Ranke has largely availed himself, is the greatest conquest of modern literature over the jealousy of politics. In his hands, and in the hands of historical writers yet more eminent than himself, the diplomatic records of former ages have acquired a new and most important utility. They are the daguerrotype of public events. With the assistance of the vast series of contemporary public correspondence which exists unbroken for the last two centuries in the archives of many European powers, it is possible to reconstruct from the life the entire web of events-and not of events alone, but of motives and even of thoughts. Interviews, which were shrouded in the gloom of night, disclose their mysterious purport to distant generations. The ciphers of cabinets give up their secrets. The ponderous locks drop off which Louis XIV. shut upon his secret treaty with the Emperor for the partition of the Spanish dominions. M. Mignet lays bare as much as Torcy or D'Avaux ever knew of the succession of Spain, and he is now preparing from similar sources his great history of the Reformation. M. Grimblot has told us the instructions of Marshal Tallard, and exhibited the confidential and uncouth caresses of William III. to his Portland. In our own language, two recent authors of eminent ability have endeavoured to shape their outlines of the court of James II. by the faithful contour of the Dutch Citters, to enliven it by the touches of Barillon or Bonrepos, and to elucidate it by the dispassionate commentary of Adda. M. Guizot is known to have drawn vast stores of information with reference to the Commonwealth of England, and especially of the foreign policy of Cromwell, from the correspondence of the French envoys in London, and from the archives of Simancas. In short, within the last fifty years, beginning with the successful investigations of Sir J. Dalrymple at Paris, a prodigious repertory of the most authentic materials of modern history has been laid open with increasing liberality to literary research. Politics have found a mode of repaying their debt to history. Every report which reaches the Foreign Office or the cabinet of the Affaires Etrangères may thus serve a more distant, but possibly a more momentous, object than its immediate purpose; and posterity will judge us more than we suppose from the most fugitive or obscure transactions of the hour. For in this vast sea of political life hardly anything totally disappears, and after many days he who runs may read the secrets of a reign. If Professor Ranke be wanting in the picturesque and energetic qualities of a French narrator, or in the lucid compression of the great classical historians, he deserves the utmost credit for the judgment and fidelity with which he extracts an essence from an enormous mass of faded blossoms. His books lose something of their attraction from their fragmentary character. The raw material is seen through the workmanship. Some fortunate discovery will tempt him to dilate with extreme minuteness on a particular transaction, or to place the finished portrait of a single individual in the foreground, whilst the other parts of the picture are out of keeping, the distance confused, and many essential features of the scene omitted. Yet, in spite of these defects, few writers of our time have done more to throw light upon the abstruser institutions and relations of European States. These merits and these defects recur to the greatest extent in the volumes before us. The title originally selected by the author-Nine Books of Prussian History'-was probably meant to convey, though by a somewhat affected allusion, their fragmentary character. They scarcely aspire to the rank of a complete history of the monarchy which rose on the sands of Brandenburg. Yet a Prussian historiographer, writing with unlimited access to the archives of Berlin, which he further improved by protracted protracted visits to the state-collections of Vienna, London, and Paris, has claims to our notice, from the positive additions he has been enabled to make to our knowledge of the eighteenth century, and especially to our acquaintance with the remarkable sovereign of Prussia, who became for a large portion of his reign the centre of the chief contests of Europe. But if Ranke's opportunities in the composition of this work were unusually great, so also were his temptations: and these temptations he has not resisted. The spirit in which he writes is not that of a critic or even an observer, but of a warm apologist. He is absolutely devoid of that sense of justice which makes even national predilections recoil from the defence of the most nefarious transactions of a less scrupulous age. The court of Frederick William I., which has been described as a pandemonium by his own daughter, and which unquestionably witnessed daily and nightly scenes of brutal sensuality and violence more adapted to the seraglio of Constantinople than to the closets of Potsdam, is made to assume the aspect of a decorous and patriotic government-whilst the character of Frederick II. has received embellishments and met with forbearance at the hands of the Professor, which that Prince himself disdained in his literary bequests to posterity and his unctuous correspondence with Voltaire. These, however, are minor peculiarities, and the object of this work is not exclusively to sketch the manners of the time or to portray the characters of Princes. It was undertaken with another aim, to which its author has sedulously adhered, sometimes at the expense of good judgment and good faith. That object has obviously been to exhibit in a single and connected view the progressive part which the dynasty of Brandenburg has taken in the decomposition of Germany; to describe and to vindicate the process by which it has gradually undermined the imperial house of Austria; to lay claim-but a most exaggerated and ill-founded claim-to an exclusive German spirit even in the heart of the French intrigues of the last century; and, finally, to leave on the mind of the reader an impression not unfavourable to the advancement of changes which our own time has been called upon to witness. The house of Brandenburg never assumed a prominent or an illustrious place in the annals of mediæval Germany. It never participated, like the princely families of Swabia, of Saxony, or of Wittelsbach, in the dignity of the imperial throne. It was not until the year 1415 that the Emperor conferred the rank of an Elector and the dignity of Arch-Chamberlain of the Empire on Frederick VI., of Hohenzollern, Burgraf of Nuremberg, with a donation of the March of Brandenburg; and long before the prowess and policy of the Prussian princes had extended their power, |